What follows is a revised version of the text on which I based a keynote delivered at Barcelona’s Universitat Progressista d’Estiu de Catalunya (UPEC) on July 2 as part of the event XXI Jornades UPEC. The event had as a theme “En defensa de l’alegria”;  that is, In Defense of Joy. The title of the address was translated into Catalan as “Alegria camarada,” or “Comrade Joy,” a much better title than the one given by the author. The address was delivered with consecutive translation, and its video recording can be found here.

“Do the horrors of the world and the capitalist and religious appropriations of joy mean that there is no joy for the Left? That we must relinquish joy when we join the party, sacrifice it for the movement? Does our ability to recognize, with all our sober senses, the reality of climate change — and the clear fact that the ruling classes, globally, will do nothing to abate it — mean that there may be joy but not for us?”

— Jodi Dean

1.

When I was told the theme I was invited to address, I was rather shocked, to put it mildly. The task was impossible. Talking about joy now? In the face of genocide and climate change? When we are all daily witnesses to violence, murdered children, people starving to death and then brutally shot as they approach the trucks distributing minimal aid — everything is collapsing in unbearable horrors. How or why should any of us speak of joy?

2.

How could any speaking of joy not be naïve, cliched, or in denial? Joy was a cringe buzzword in the Kamala Harris campaign (she was the Democrat candidate for US president after Joe Biden pulled out in the summer of 2024). The word also resonates among upbeat, often religious, social media influencers. And, perhaps most poignantly for those of us on the Left, joy just seems wrong: a betrayal of the occupied, deported, expelled; a kind of accommodation with violence, since, after all, life goes on for us.

3.

What, then, is the Left to do about joy? Do the horrors of the world and the capitalist and religious appropriations of joy mean that there is no joy for the Left? That we must relinquish joy when we join the party, sacrifice it for the movement? Does our ability to recognize, with all our sober senses, the reality of climate change — and the clear fact that the ruling classes, globally, will do nothing to abate it — does it after all mean that there may be joy but not for us?

4.

Let’s face it: sometimes on the Left this is how we present ourselves. No wonder the Right is winning. It promises enjoyment, and its death cults deliver an array of fake and substitute joys.

5.

Today the true reactionary is the one who gives in to despair, who says there is no hope, who sacrifices the optimism of the intellect to the pessimism of the will. We must resist doomerism, catastrophism, and the hopeless negativity that sees nothing but fascism everywhere. Who does the embrace of collapse serve? Does it help us build power? Does it inspire us to put aside personal pleasures and preferences for the sake of a larger struggle? My first point, then, is to urge a refusal of all embraces of collapse that fail to recognize possibilities for the new in the death of the old.

6.

My second point, and the focus of my remarks today, is the alternative — the joy that comes from comradeship, comradely joy. Comrades are those on the same side of a political struggle, those who voluntarily bind themselves together to fight and win. For comrades, joy comes from resistance, from fighting back, from strengthening each other so that we can refuse to submit to oppression. In talking about comradely joy, my goal is to steer clear of the cliches and commercialism of social media’s branded joy, and instead present comradely joy as the expansion in courage and strength we generate as comrades on the same side of a political struggle.

7.

Comradely joy is richly embedded in the histories of communist struggle. Consider Amircal Cabral’s speech in 1966 in Havanah at the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Cabral opens his speech — The Weapon of Theory — by praising the Cuban Revolution for its endurance and how it provides to all struggles for national liberation “a lesson in courage, determination, humanity and confidence in the people.” He says that “the deep joy and infectious rhythm” make “the construction of socialism in Cuba a new phenomenon for the world.” Deep joy —a joy that comes from unity in building a new, liberated society, over and against all that the imperialist enemy would do to prevent it. It’s collective; it’s not the same as individual happiness; it’s not individual at all, but an outgrowth of collective strength and resistance. And this joy is about pursuing a future, fighting for something beyond what is given.

8.

Consider as well Thomas Sankara’s description of the deep love between Burkinabe men and trees in his 1986 speech in Paris, “Imperialism is the arsonist of our trees and forests.” Sankara presents himself “as merely the humble spokesperson of a people who, having passively watched their natural environment die, refuse to watch themselves die.” Refusing to die, to give up, their revolution in the Sahel was fought in large part through the planting of trees, over ten million trees. The struggle for life was the struggle to preserve the forests from imperialism’s colonial plunder. Sankara says, “We rely on these revolutionary principles of struggle so that the green of abundance, joy, and happiness may take its rightful place. We believe in the power of the Revolution to stop the death of our Faso and usher in a bright future for it.”

9.

Why does an embrace of joy seem so hard for the Left today? I already mentioned the miserable times we live in. But is this so new or rare? Palestine has been occupied over 75 years. When have we not had devastating wars, peoples, communities, countries enduring devastating collapse, expropriation, immiseration? It’s not just a problem of capitalism, colonialism, fascism, the reactionary right: the question of joy is a question of our political capacity to build strength, to enhance our collective courage. Joy isn’t about winning — although of course we want to win. Joy is the affective element that accompanies the refusal to submit, the liberating feeling of standing up to oppression, exploitation, occupation, when we realize we are not alone, but stand together with millions, billions. It is also a question of the future. Both Cabral and Sankara associate joy with the future being built through revolutionary struggle. It’s like this future provides the light that illuminates the present that will bring it about. Perhaps one of the reasons joy seems unreachable to some of us on the Left is that we have a hard time envisioning a future, a future that is better than what we have, one worth fighting for. When we can’t see a future, we can’t find a reason to fight.

 

10.

Some might say, wait a minute, isn’t a kind of stern, harsh, joyless discipline characteristic of communism, especially Leninism and Bolshevism? Let’s nip this problem in the bud with a bit of a digression. It’s a myth that Lenin was uptight, repressed, gloomy, and ascetic. If you read the reminiscences of Clara Zetkin and Nadezhda Krupskaya, you get a very different Lenin: he had a kitten and trained his dog to do tricks. He liked hiking in the mountains. Krupskaya says that he was “always being enthusiastic over somebody or something.” In a conversation with Zetkin, Lenin said: “Communism should not bring asceticism, but joy and strength, stemming, among other things, from a consummate love life.” Communism is about joy and the goal of the revolution is to bring about new conditions for collective joy.

11.

The Lenin of enthusiasm and joy doesn’t fit with the more common presentation of Lenin as an austere and dogmatic revolutionary. Where does this image come from? Various academics and biographers blame Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, a very long and not very good novel, written and published while Chernyshevsky was in prison. It was especially popular in Russian revolutionary circles. Lenin uses the title in his influential text on party organization and tactics. Various academics and biographies claim that Lenin likely modeled himself after “the protagonist of the book,” Rakhmetov. They are wrong, primarily because Rakhmetov is not the main character at all — he only appears in about 30 pages in the middle of this 500page tome. The main character is the highly energetic Vera Pavlovna. The novel recounts how she escapes being trapped in a loveless traditional marriage, sets up a dress-making operation, employing seamstresses at high wages and redistributing profits back to them as well as engaging them in management and planning and ultimately expanding the whole operation into a consumer collective, bank, and communal household. Lenin read What Is To Be Done? five times. He kept two photos of Chernyshevsky (the author) in his scrapbook. Young Russians of Lenin’s time adored the book, treating it as a guide to life. As Claudia Verhoeven writes, it’s a “joyful book” that “teaches readers how to live while waiting for the possible to become real.”

12.

Alexandra Kollontai was also influenced by Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? She uses the term “love comradeship” to describe the joy of comradely relations the book depicts. For Kollontai, comradeship is a core principle of proletarian morality, the key to the “radical re-education of our psyche” under communism. Comradeship engenders new feelings such that people no longer feel themselves unequal and compelled to submit. Now they are “capable of freedom instead of being bound by a sense of property, capable of comradeship rather than inequality and submission.” Kollontai associates comradeship with the joy that comes with freedom from servitude and oppression, with equality. She links comradeship to a struggle for and vision of a future in which all will be comrades. Despair has been shaken off, defeat rejected. The end isn’t certain but the very rejection of property, oppression, and degradation produces joy.

13.

Most of us have experienced the joyous disruptions of crowds in the streets, exhilarating mass demonstrations, the strength arising from collective being together, where we don’t belong, over and against those who divide us and want us to be quiet. These moments of mass power and potential are an important source of political joy. The joy of comrades goes further, extending beyond the beautiful moment of the crowd and into the building of relations and organizations capable of enduring. As a carrier of expectations and as a form of political belonging, the comrade has four interconnected attributes: discipline, joy, enthusiasm, and courage. I will focus on the first two, discipline and joy.

14.

Comradeship is a disciplining relation: expectations, and the responsibility to meet them, constrain individual action and generate collective capacity. Comrades learn to push immediate self-interest and the desire for personal comfort or advancement aside for the sake of the struggle. Discipline produces a new force, one strong enough to endure the long years of revolutionary struggle. In the words of one Communist quoted in Vivian Gornick’s book The Romance of American Communism: “To be involved with people in a political enterprise, to feel that particular comradeship, to watch people becoming in such an atmosphere, that is to feel the world being made anew.”

15.

Lenin thought that discipline was more revolutionary than the defeat of the bourgeoisie, “for it is a victory over our own conservatism, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism, a victory over the habits left as a heritage to the worker and peasant by accursed capitalism.” Our commitment to working together toward our common goal works back on us, enabling us to surmount those individualist attributes produced by capitalism. We can make mistakes, learn, and change. By recognizing our own inadequacies, we come to understand the need to be generous and understanding toward the shortcomings of others. We develop an appreciation for strengths and talents we had been unable to see. We become a new kind of collectivity.

16.

Accompanying comradely discipline is joy. In a pamphlet on Communist subbotniks (Saturdays of voluntary labor undertaken during the Civil War), Lenin quotes an article that appeared in Pravda celebrating the enthusiastic voluntary work done on the Moscow-Kazan railway. This article describes how a bunch of workers rolled an enormous locomotive wheel into place: “one’s heart was filled with fervent joy at the sight of this collective effort, and one’s conviction was strengthened that the victory of the working class was unshakable . . . When the work was finished those present witnessed an unprecedented scene: a hundred Communists, weary, but with the light of joy in their eyes, greeted their success with the solemn strains of the Internationale.” Joy is felt by comrades and experienced by those who witness how collective effort changes the world. Through the intense collectivity that discipline enables, comrades do the impossible. They are liberated from prior expectations and constraints. Joy accompanies the sense of collective invincibility. Together we made it happen —and we did it for purposes larger than ourselves.

17.

To conclude: in a description of some of the discomforts endured by revolutionaries, Che Guevera talks about rough roads and uncomfortable camp cots. And he adds “we looked into our future with impatient joy.” We need to do the same. The trials, discomforts, and losses are real. But we have to reject doomerism, catastrophism, collapsing, exhaustion, and melancholia as the worse forms of reaction today. We have to fight them within our ranks, and embrace the struggle with the comradely joy through which we win.

Featured image: Amilcar Cabral and Fidel Castro surrounded by Cuban combatants during the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966. Photo courtesy of New Afrika History.

Jodi Dean